Salesforce wants you to wear your CRM on your sleeve

SALESFORCE has become the latest major organisation to throw its weight behind the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution.

The customer relationship management (CRM) firm has announced the addition of Salesforce Wear to its Salesforce1 platform, with the aim of offering developers the chance to design apps to leverage Salesforce in a range of existing technology.

Although wearables are repeatedly touted as the 'next big thing', most of the results have been mediocre, leaving the wearables market suffering from something of an image crisis. The advent of enterprise firms in wearables likely will do nothing to help this, as they will look like a parent trying to 'friend' their teenager on social media.

Developers do not have to be Salesforce customers to access the tools, but a subscription is required to publish an app. On the company blog, Salesforce VP of Developer Relations Adam Seligman said, "We wanted to do some of the early work, learning how these platforms work, so you can go faster and invent incredible new wearable apps connected to the Salesforce1 platform.

"We found a huge variation in programming models, UX primitives and security and identity flows. These technologies are early but they are coming fast, and we want our developer community to be first in the enterprise putting them to work!"

The company is openly hedging its bets on what technologies, if any, are going to prevail in the wearables market.

The company has also developed six apps to demonstrate the possible applications. They include a Samsung Galaxy Gear app to get insight into the attendees of a meeting, and a "service" app for Glass. The company recently buried the hatchet in its long-running feud with Microsoft with a joint venture, alongside its existing hook up with Oracle. µ